Atropa Belladonna and Other Quaint Flora
by sawadough
Summary: A bored eight-year old Harry Potter with a penchant for making mischief and an affinity for plants comes across a connection to the Wizarding world in the form of a prickly new neighbor. And this neighbor knows a certain Potions Professor...


Atropa Belladonna and Other Quaint Flora  
by sawadough

Chapter 1: About Two Residents Living in the Nice Row of Houses

Augustus Blackthorne's beady yellow eyes surveyed the bedlam around him with mild disgust and annoyance. His black hair speckled with hints of gray was unkempt from the day of stressful moving. How dare those ignorant muggles, tossing around his precious herbs and potions haphazardly. He had moved his possessions inside his house with magic, but it was too suspicious to arrange the front yard the wizarding way as well without attracting unwanted attention.

"Watch it, you dolt!" he yelled. "That mugwort you're handling so roughly is worth five times of you!"

The movers glanced at him incredulously, and paid him no mind.

"Those bloody Ministry riffraffs," he thought murderously. "Did I do anything wrong that they had to ban me to this hellhole of a place? I was just minding my own business, I was," he grumbled. "They should have minded their own business. What's the big deal of selling my so-called 'dark' and 'illegal' potions? I've done that underground for years..why, if I ever catch that tale-teller..." He kicked the wall of his new house. Big mistake. He yelped as he grabbed his foot. "It's all the Ministry's fault! Especially those young, arrogant hooligans who think they're all that. Don't they know how to respect their elders?"

He cringed slightly as he made his way inside his new home at Number 9 Privet Drive to escape the afternoon heat. For some reason, the fact that all of the houses on this street were identical annoyed him. "All I can do," he thought bitterly, "is make the best of it. Not that I'll be happy doing it." At least he had been able to get a semblance of a potions lab built into the muggle house before he moved in. And he had his herb garden bundled along with him out of his old residence, though he and the muggle movers had to replant them again.

He regarded himself with exaggerated amazement. "Are you actually looking at the bright side of the situation for once, ol' Auggie?" he snickered softly. He must really be out of it. He wouldn't say that he had what others might call a cheerful disposition.

Augustus was a man of few words, and when he did speak, the words that spat out were generally not those the recipient would care to hear in the first place. He'd had a hard and lonely childhood, which led to his prickly, me-against-the-world outlook--as a youth, an adult, and finally a slightly-but-not-quite-old man. Potions had been his only escape, taught to him outside of his normal wizard schooling by a kind, elderly neighbor who had retired from the working world. That neighbor had been his surrogate parent and personal idol, who looked past his homely looks and nasty temperament to see Augustus, the shy boy starved for attention. Augustus had few friends, finding his peers uninteresting and malicious. He had only two goals in his life--both of which he achieved--to receive his Potions Mastery and to own his personal potions shop; but to get there, he climbed every tribulation and trial alone, looking straight ahead, without any of what he called "distractions." By the time he reached the top, he realized that he had nowhere to go and no one to turn to for the remainder of his life. And so days for him in his potions shop meshed together into months and years, a repetitious, bland life he lived because he had nothing else to do, no one else that wanted him, but for his precious plants and bubbly concoctions.

At the very least, this neighborhood seemed quiet enough. And if he was going to live here for quite a while, he might as well try to enjoy it. He would still be brewing his potions, and he never needed much in terms of friendships anyway. He had Anubis, a black cat with a sassy personality, for that. And though he lost his shop, he would make his living selling his concoctions using owl-mail. His potions had quite the good reputation in the Wizarding World, overriding the more unpleasant parts of his personality.

And so he sat, dreaming of a hopefully tranquil existence in this new house, sipping a hot mug of tea in his favorite chair, not knowing that in a few more hours, he would meet someone that would stir up his peaceful plans for the next few years--just a little bit.

----

Eight-year old Harry Potter lived an uninteresting life at Number 4 Privet Drive, cupboard under the stairs. He was a quiet child, not so much shy, but more, as his Aunt Petunia complained, with his "head always in the clouds." He had a few responsibilities in the house--making breakfast and dinner, cleaning, and tending the garden--but besides that, his relatives liked to pretend he didn't exist. He was not to speak to his "family" unless asked a question, and his whale of a cousin Dudley made sure he didn't have any friends at school; so all in all, Harry didn't have much of a social life. He made breakfast, went to school til afternoon, tended the garden, made dinner, then was sent out of the house until bedtime. Not that he ever felt like he missed out; after all, he'd lived his whole life this way.

Harry's favorite pastimes for the hours he was banned from his residence were walking on fences, screaming while galloping around the neighborhood, and drawing pictures (which he thought were quite lovely and inventive) on sidewalks with a piece of chalk he stole from Dudley's room. Not unexpectedly, the neighbors were not very fond of him and often yelled and complained about him to his aunt and uncle; but it didn't do much good. They found that his relatives didn't care too much about what their nephew did, and the slightly overweight local policeman grew tired of always toddling after Harry, attempting to catch him but never achieving much more than a sideache and a shirt soaked with sweat. So the neighbors resignedly got used to Harry in their lives.

Presently, Harry was squinting at house Number 9 (he had just been shooed out of the house after making dinner). He noticed some new plants in the garden that looked quite interesting. Tending his aunt's garden was one of the few highlights of his life, and he often liked spying on any new specimens in the neighbors' gardens and reading about plants at the library. Someone new must have just moved in, he mused, since Number 9's backyard had been something of a desert wasteland before. Hmm, and this plant, at first glance it looked somewhat like a weed, but there was something about it...he thought he had seen a picture of one in a library book before. It started with a B...belladonna! That was it! But how strange, he didn't think belladonna was a normal occurrence in a house garden. Whatever the case, this and the other nice blooms would create a nice ambiance as he got started on another brilliant sidewalk masterpiece. He liked drawing while smelling the scents and feeling the presence of plants around him. And so he eagerly dug out the worn piece of chalk from the right pocket of his over-sized trousers (oh why did Dudley have to be so BIG?) and got down on his hands and knees to begin his art, blissfully unaware of the wrath of the cantankerous new neighbor that would soon be unleashed upon him in about half an hour. But for now, Harry was content.


End file.
